4 years....enough for a lifetime?

Sitting down to pack 4 years into 4 cartons I wondered if it was all that it was. 4 years, 4 cartons of luggage and memories lasting a lifetime. For the many of us life had not begun until we left home with dreams in our eyes and a bag full of necessities to an unknown place to live among unknown people and just when life started making sense and the “unknown” started feeling like home, it is time to move; again ; to keep in motion the journey called life. Let me not sugarcoat this and call it the “best days of my life” no, how can one objectively categorise these four years into good/bad or their superlative degrees? These days have been marked with far more myriad events and emotions than just good/bad. They have been tough as they could have been. So tough that sometimes (read very often) you feel like leaving everything behind and running away into the wilderness never to be found again. But hey! You made it…through the mud pits and the long dreary tunnel you made it. This right now is your Shawshank Redemption moment. The days have also been fun. The most fun you have had in your life. 4 am parties and unlimited intoxicated bullshitting around. You’ve made friends. Great ones. Like the Marauders type good friends. And you might also become the god parents to their children in the future! And you have also made enemies, but let’s not go there today. And then you might have fallen in love, for some once, for others multiple times, so many that the people around you lost count, and for some of us our love lives in these 4 years have been akin to an highly anticipated episode of the “Keeping up with the Kardashians”. But through all of this, these four years have been what they could have been. Like our parents before us, like the dinner table conversations sometimes they begin with, “During college, once….” These are our stories, our tales, our fables for our children and for theirs and no matter how many times we complained, how many times we just wanted out, how do you begin to separate these 4 years from your existence? You cannot and you will not want to, because this is a part of your identity. A part of you!! What you made of these years is yours for eternity! Hence congrats mate! We were in this together!! 

Grown Up?

"Nobody feels like an adult. It's the world's dirty secret"- Liberal Arts

It's the end of an era, like they proverbially say. I mean college is getting over, you are graduating in a month, you have a job in your hand and suddenly everybody expects you to behave a certain way. A certain code of conduct needs to be followed and deferring from it can, to put it subtly, land you in soup. Technically when you entered college you were an adult in the proper legal sense but now that you at the end of it, you are the "adult" version of an "adult. *This should make absolute sense! like duh!!* Your Facebook newsfeed is suddenly a repository of wedding pictures and baby pictures. Your friends and immediate seniors are getting married and having babies and there you are in your superman shorts and 1st semester college tee, a packet of Lay's Magic masala as your saving grace, 3 am in the morning, tired but not sleeping because it ain't worth sleeping until you want to gouge your eyeballs out, searching for the lastest episode of Flash or if Charlie Cox has a girlfriend and intermittently wondering if you will ever "grow up". I mean deep down within you are still that 15 year old, who has no clue exactly what is happening but then you surely want to be Elon Musk's competitor in the space business and have a lunch date with Scarlett Johansson, but you have no idea how. Like a well loved character in a much watched web series asks- how do you ever know when you grow up?? Like how do you know that the things you decide have to be absolute? Suddenly all your decisions are yours and the privilege of the safety net just ceases to exist! Sometimes it appears that all the "adults" in the world aren't adults per se. You never "grow up". You just accumulate experiences and like that code you ran the other day and it showed compilation errors, you start learning newer ways to debug it and run the program better in the near future... Well, all being said and done, I believe it's our time to enter the "real" world! All aboard! And God Speed!! 

We the Humans?

These days I read these news articles, see these videos and a sudden weight falls on my heart. A kind of gut wrenching feeling which I cannot erase in totality. Something brims up to the full within me, may be a sorry, silent scream. Something uneasy. Like a very small yet existing part of your soul is hurt, bruised really bad and you can’t ease that pain. Amidst all the work and your tight schedule these articles, these videos with very graphic images or footage of the reign of terror, dead and wounded civilians, the smiling portraits of the harbingers of death and vengeful world leaders,  though are just images beamed onto your screen or just ink on a paper, jabs at you and you cannot rub some ointment on it and hope it will be fine next day because you know it is happening and you know it is true. And you don’t even know how to make them right.  You don’t know them, these people- the victims or the assailants. Then why feel any of it? Because these are the people just like you and me, leading their normal lives and having dreams and aspirations. Only theirs have been brutally snatched away for no fault of theirs. And this is what disturbs me. And it disturbs me to my very core.

I may be very far away from where the “war” currently is but the sorry state of human life makes me cringe and cry in horror. Like how unworthy has human life become all of a sudden? Have you seen the faces of those children in the war zone and fleeing from their homes? Their eyes are dead. They have been so scarred that I cannot imagine what it must be to be one of them.

All political affiliations and arguments aside, all diplomatic discussions aside, all strategic plots aside, you know who is suffering the most? These civilians. Caught up in the crossfire between war politics and scapegoats to international rivalries, these are the people- people who dream nothing but to lead a life where tomorrow holds possibilities, where they can earn their daily bread and come back home to a warm bed, where children have nothing but homeworks and tests to worry about, where the parents’ only worry about their kids is their academic performance and may be that girl or boy problem their teenaged kid is talking about, not one where they ask themselves if they will wake up to their child’s living or dead body the next day- who are hurt the most. It is these people like us, the “commoners”, the apparent “nobodys”, the “populate” that is suffering every day. They bombed their people who were leading their normal lives, so they bombed back in retaliation. And jeopardized in the exchange of fire between rivals whose politics is beyond their understanding, is that 5 year old kid who just wanted orange cake for breakfast the next day, or the new mother trying to manage home and work or the father deciding if his daughter would like the pink or the purple dress for her birthday. All of a sudden the world they so meticulously built vaporizes into thin air. The kid now has to worry if he will get food at all to eat the next day and the days after that. He just saw his elder brother not talking to him anymore, and his parents wailing till they had no more tears left to cry and he had to suddenly leave all his toys and his favorite video game behind and ride a tiny boat away from home, wrapped in his frail grandmother’s old blanket. He did not like it. It was cold and the sea is scary, but Father said it would be fine. But brother won’t be joining them and he did not understand why. The young mother now doesn’t know if she would be ever able to manage everything on her own for the entire length of her life because one half of her support system now just vanished. He had gone for a concert, never came back. The father dressed his daughter in the pink dress, yes she liked pink better, and lowered her six feet under the ground along with his soul.

I do not know what I can do for them. I do not know if I am allowed to feel the pain of these people who are apparent strangers. I do not know if it will all be the same again. I do not know if there will be a bigger war. But I do not want those nightmares to haunt me. I do not want those bad dreams to wake me up all weary and scared where I had dreamt of being in those places and losing people who matter. If mere nightmares can affect me to such an extent I cannot imagine what it must be to be living in one of them. 

Faith, trust and everything in between

It is a fast world. A very fast world. No time to stop. No time to wait. It keeps moving at a

ricocheting bullet's speed and every day we find ourselves at this odd position of trying to catch that bullet by our teeth, yes metaphorically!! Skeptics would often deem the world we live in today as a "crazy mess" where rules and norms are flouted for the sake of the final attainment and yet are in odd alignment to the organised chaos we all are subjecting ourselves to. But let's take a moment of quiet here and pan and zoom at those specific moments of our lives where the din of the everyday life calmed down a little, and a mellow tune wafted in the air around us. Some moments, whether lasting or fleeting that have registered themselves in our memories and no matter how old the brain gets those remain as new a new film roll, no noise, no disturbance, in contemporary parlance like a 2160p 4k HD video, no buffering. Everyone has those don't we? And often associated with those memories is/are someone/many of our own kind. This is human nature. And humans are social animals. Or have we become so nuclear in our choice of existence that we do not necessarily associate any good memories with anyone of our kind. I bet we haven't. Evolution hasn't caught up with us so fast. And hopefully Darwin's brainchild will not in this front throughout the existence of life as we know it, for if not for nothing, at least for the sake of satiating the most carnal of human needs. However as the current age would have it, our interactions with the likes of our kind have become more unattached than we would like them to be. Baring oneself to another has become a task requiring tremendous amount of conviction and the fathomable knowledge that may be that trust with which we entrust another be just another fodder for gossip. May be we miscalculate our relationships and the projectile motion of emotions fall to the target not intended upon. But it is what it is. Sometimes we fall back to what the human nature is, a solid head and a gooey heart. We cannot contain emotions every time in a lead canister and sometimes we have to take that leap of faith. We cannot decide what another makes of it. If he/she decides to dump that trust down the proverbial gutter or embrace and reciprocate it or may be it just doesn't matter at all. Because we do not control another. We do not dictate the terms of their life. We promised the forever bond, sharing a part of our frail and vulnerable energy with them hoping it will be forever safe, not tampered with, not taken as our weakness, not the other way round. But may be, just may be, in the best case scenario, their exists some fine balance in this universe where faith like a dimension invisible to the naked eye is an energy which can never cease to exist but only passed on from one to another. May be our frailties and fear are taken as nothing but another idiosyncrasy that defines us and not as our formidable weakness.This is an Utopian fantasy, agreed. But who said fables cannot be real? Is it too much to ask for? Or is there some fancy system of justice for those responsible for any disturbance in the fine balance?

I'll not fret over the answer for something tells me that time with all it's theatrics will reveal that unto me. 

Beyond Death....

They thought she was dead,
Bleeding from her core,
Wounds unfathomable and deep,
Seared on the surface where their weapons hit her body.
They thought they had killed her
Her voice forgotten
Her song unsung....

But deep within a spark lurked,
Weak but not vanquished
Small but invincible
And like a Phoenix from the ashes burnt
Rose she

And her frigid body
Cold from a century's old lesion
Her soul torn apart and crushed
Flopping on the floor like a rag doll
Mended...

Call it sorcery, or the scintillating glimmer of a new dawn
The broken pieces rejoined and bound together with newer strength
Jagged ends of her soul fit together like a jigsaw
She rose

To take on the kingdom which was once her
The wounds will not be forgotten
And the debt of each piece of flesh slit from her body repaid in flesh and blood
The new dawn had arisen
And with it a new HER.

Acceptance

Look over your shoulder...you see the shadow don't you? It is dark, very dark in there but it moves along with you never leaving your side when the light shines on your being and illuminates your existence. You can hate it perhaps, it is the darkest reflection of your self you'll ever witness...but can you leave it behind? Not unless you are ready to forgo the light ahead in your path. You accept it...that is you, your shadow is you, yes ain't Greenday no crooning about it for no reason in- "Boulevard of broken dreams" or closer home, Bhupenda singing the same in -"Moi aru mur sa". Why is that self judgement is so much more easier than self acceptance? Why are we as a human race constantly contradicting our ideals about self? Is juxtaposing these facts our favorite hobby? Or a constant state of paradox gravely satisfying? Won't it be nice someday to be just be you and not the clothes you are wearing, the car you are driving, the money in your wallet, your grades and everythig else that seemingly seem to define you and yet is not you? How long do you want to be the guy in the Armani suit, the woman in the Porsche, the millionaire or the 9 pointer, or in contradiction can we overlook, the girl in the shaggy tee, the guy with the old Hero bicycle, the bankrupt or the 6 pointer? Can we just not accept the fact that it is as good or bad as it gets and it can only get better. Can we with that wide Augustus Waters smile plastered on our face proudly claim- "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up my friend"? Isn't the choice completely ours whether we are bogged down by what we expect of our self, which in many cases is nothing but a reflection of what the society expects of us, and choose to remain in the dungeons of depression, or accept that it is what it is and make that the threshold stand up right there and start. Life gets a little more meaningful when one can search for comfort in one's own skin. There are no set rules of how the world functions, just stereotypes, easier to do away with than imagined. And these can never and should never dictate how you try and approach life. There's a different path not taken, off the beaten track, and that is where LIFE begins!!

Peek-a-boo- The story of cleavage and butt cheeks.

Yes you read it right. The headline screams something that you would naturally not like talking about in the public platform but something which forms part of your jokes with your gang. But of late, this has been a major issue doing the rounds. A certain media group is under a lot of flak for the blatant objectification of a particular female cine star’s body part for the mere purpose of more viewership, which equals more money. What is astonishing is that this particular media group is not new found, but one with a lot of reputation and most certainly does not need to resort to such vile means of publicity for more viewership/readership. It perhaps makes more money than any other leading daily of the nation with a combined earnings from its daily papers, e-paper and apps. In fact let alone others, I myself have the app of this newspaper group installed in my cell phone because till yesterday it was a respectable news provider, a firm believer in the concept of no nonsense, non- “sansanikhes” news. But what has been done has been done and the lows to which this particular media group has stooped cannot be undone.

But what is more interesting than the degradation of news quality of this media group is the retaliation of that particular cine star who was in the eye of the storm. She has rightly condemned such a “cheap” act of publicity and has been lauded by many, her co-stars, industry insiders and the common public alike, for her stand against such nonsense. A micro blogging site is abuzz these past few days with how brave she has been to stand up against such mindlessness which demeans the status of women and how utterly pathetic it is on the part of the newspaper to be a part of that hypocrisy which shouts slogans on women empowerment by the day and leech at the same women by the night. I have been a silent spectator to these events.

Why silence you may ask. To be honest I have just been observing. Observing at how even the cine star in her own ways is a contributor to that same hypocrisy. Don’t judge me as yet, but do you not think that at a very rudimentary level the cinema industry, the Hindi cinema industry to be precise, due to its wider reach and very high popularity among the masses, is one of the biggest patrons of such distasteful objectification of women in our glorious nation? There is such a directly proportional relation between skin show and box office records in most of the cases in our country that I do not need to be a mathematician to figure it out.  To be sexy, to be bold and beautiful is a completely different concept. In this case the person knows how one is carrying oneself in full sanity of mind. But how do you justify the repulsive portrayal of women in those very famous “Item songs”? Lead actresses do not mind lip syncing to lines like “Mein toh tandoori murgi hu yaar, gaatkale saiyyan alcohol se”, or shake those assets in full public galore to songs whose lyrics if read out without any tune sound exactly like, “I attend nature’s call every morning”. 

But they are actors you say. They are just acting. Does not mean that is their ideology. Agreed completely. But remember that epic Batman quote, “It is not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you”? No, I did not for once say that nudity in art is objectionable. No. But disrespect of art is. The biggest mindless crore grosser in the box office often defies what we can call logic. It has all the elements to make sure that at every single second that it runs, good cinema takes a blow and the soul of art dies. Cinema that runs solely on the size of a woman’s bust and bottoms is not cinema. It is a cringe worthy buffoonery thrust into the face of the public. And with the state of education that this country is in,how can you expect every person in this country to differentiate and take educated decisions and dismiss such media as nothing but a light investment with absolutely no return?

I am glad that the actress has spoken against what is indeed a breach of ethical conduct. A human body is one of nature’s finest creations. It is to be loved and adored, not leeched and lusted upon. It is no material to be sold in the gory market of leering eyes. But the paradox that this lady has got herself into is something which can only be solved by the corrective thinking of the mass and the media makers. Today she is famous and has the ability to let her voice be heard loud and clear across the length and breadth of the country and beyond, but the industry she is in and contributing to, has the effect of its distasteful portrayal of women resonating across the country and may be allowing some unnamed descendant of Eve to bear the brunt of it, whose story we may never hear. It is not until you learn that the medicine you or your folks are serving is bitter that you start complaining.